Key Takeaways
1. Prioritize Emotional Intelligence (Sales EQ) in Hiring
If you’re serious about creating great sales teams, great sales cultures, get serious about interviewing and eliminating candidates who are not a good culture fit.
Beyond IQ. Many sales organizations mistakenly focus solely on Sales IQ—hard skills like industry experience and selling techniques—when hiring. However, the biggest reason for sales performance issues often stems from a lack of soft skills, or Emotional Intelligence (Sales EQ). Hiring for Sales EQ means looking for traits that align with your company's culture and values, recognizing that a "bad apple" can quickly spread negativity through emotional contagion.
The "something" missing. Adopt a hiring philosophy like Sonny Weaver from "Draft Day," actively seeking out the "something" missing in a candidate's profile. This isn't about perfection, but about identifying flaws you can live with or develop. Crucially, define your non-negotiables—core values like a strong work ethic or integrity—and disqualify candidates who don't meet them, regardless of their hard skills. Ignoring red flags during the interview process often leads to bigger problems later.
Avoid the insanity loop. The "insanity loop" in sales management involves repeatedly trying to fix soft skill problems with more hard skill training. By prioritizing Sales EQ in hiring, you proactively prevent many common sales management challenges, such as:
- Sales teams discounting on price despite negotiation training.
- Daily sales drama consuming valuable leadership time.
- Salespeople talking too much and listening too little.
- Lack of motivation to learn new insights.
2. Cultivate Delayed Gratification and Perseverance
You’ve got to do your first year sometime. And most salespeople never put in the work to do their first year.
Marshmallow grabbers. Drawing from the "Marshmallow Study," the book highlights that salespeople lacking delayed gratification—the "cookie monsters" or "marshmallow grabbers"—struggle with the sustained effort required for sales success. These individuals seek instant results, often abandoning long-term goals for immediate, less impactful activities. This mindset negatively affects crucial sales processes.
Impact on sales results:
- Prospecting: Instant gratification leads to generic, one-size-fits-all outreach, yielding dismal results.
- Skill Development: They avoid the consistent practice needed for sales mastery, settling for average performance.
- Major Account Selling: They shy away from complex, longer sales cycles, preferring easier, smaller deals.
- Job-hopping: They frequently switch jobs when challenges arise, failing to invest in making their current situation better.
Climbers, not campers. Sales leaders should actively seek "climbers"—individuals passionate about continuous learning and improvement, who view adversity as a natural part of the journey. These resilient salespeople possess an internal locus of control, taking responsibility for their outcomes rather than blaming external factors. They "dig six-foot wells" by consistently putting in the work, even when faced with setbacks, ultimately leading to sustained success and higher career satisfaction.
3. Develop Assertiveness for Effective Sales Conversations
Assertive salespeople are able to stand up for what they need and do it in a way that doesn’t offend other people.
Beyond behavioral style. Assertiveness is a critical emotional intelligence skill, distinct from a dominant behavioral style. It enables salespeople to clearly state their needs without being aggressive or passive-aggressive. Salespeople lacking assertiveness often struggle with difficult conversations, leading to decreased project profitability, unqualified pipelines, and missed sales forecasts.
Impact on sales results:
- Budget Discussions: Non-assertive reps fail to uncover prospects' true investment capacity, leading to wasted time on unqualified proposals.
- Decision-Maker Access: They hesitate to request meetings with all key buying influences, losing opportunities to more assertive competitors.
- Qualifying Prospects: They continue to pursue "nice" prospects with no compelling reason to buy, filling pipelines with "practice proposals."
- Setting Next Steps: They avoid establishing clear, mutually agreed-upon next steps, leading to endless "chase mode" and stalled deals.
Aggression vs. assertiveness. Aggressive salespeople, while seemingly direct, often alienate prospects with pushy tactics and a lack of listening, resulting in lost sales due to unlikability. The ideal is an assertive salesperson who can advocate for their needs respectfully, fostering true win-win partnerships. Sales managers must assess assertiveness during interviews and coach existing teams, recognizing that this skill can be situational and requires ongoing development.
4. Foster a Culture of Continuous Learning
If you hire a salesperson who doesn’t value learning, the longer this individual works for you, the dumber this person will be.
The learning imperative. In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, continuous learning is not a luxury but a necessity for sales success. Research shows that highly successful individuals, like Warren Buffett and Tony Robbins, dedicate significant time daily to learning. Companies that foster a learning culture consistently hit sales targets and achieve remarkable growth, as exemplified by Pie Consulting and Engineering's 189% revenue growth.
The disconnect. Many sales leaders overlook a candidate's "appetite and aptitude for learning" during the hiring process. This oversight leads to investing time and money in training salespeople who lack the desire or ability to grow. Without a commitment to continuous improvement, salespeople become "VCR players in a streaming video world," relying on outdated knowledge and losing relevance to more adaptable competitors.
Hire "buggers." Seek out "buggers"—salespeople who are passionately curious and proactively seek out knowledge and coaching from managers, senior reps, and peers. These individuals embody Angela Duckworth's concept of "grit," demonstrating perseverance in their personal development. They don't wait for the company to make them better; they take responsibility for becoming the best, ensuring they remain trusted advisors who offer fresh insights and thought leadership to clients.
5. Hire Coachable Salespeople with Humility
Confident salespeople raise their hand, admit mistakes, and ask for advice on how to prevent or solve problems.
Behavior selection, not modification. Sales leaders often find themselves in the exhausting role of "psychologist" because they fail to hire coachable salespeople. Coachable individuals are comfortable with feedback, viewing it as a tool for growth rather than a personal attack. Companies that foster open feedback cultures achieve significantly higher returns, highlighting the financial impact of coachability.
Traits of coachability:
- Self-Regard/Self-Esteem: An inner confidence that allows them to admit strengths and weaknesses without defensiveness. They take responsibility for actions and outcomes, fostering "raise your hand" cultures where mistakes are quickly addressed.
- Growth Mindset: Believing they can learn and change, they welcome feedback as essential for personal and professional improvement. They avoid the "fixed mindset" trap of confirming intelligence rather than improving it.
- Humility: Humble leaders and salespeople are open to learning from others, listen deeply, and give credit easily. Arrogant salespeople, conversely, often think they know everything, hindering their ability to listen and learn, and negatively impacting team culture.
Avoid prima donnas. The myth that top salespeople are inherently high-maintenance "prima donnas" is challenged. Hiring self-absorbed, arrogant individuals, even if they hit numbers, erodes team culture and core values. Prioritize humility in hiring, as it drives deep listening, innovative thinking, and ultimately, revenue.
6. Master Emotion Management to Avoid the "Trigger-Response-Regret Loop"
Speak when you are angry and you’ll make the best speech you ever regret.
The neuroscience of selling. Effective sales, like hostage negotiation or NBA coaching, requires the ability to manage emotions under pressure. Salespeople must understand the interplay between their logical prefrontal cortex and their reactive amygdala (reptilian brain). Under perceived threat, the amygdala can override rational thought, leading to the "trigger-response-regret loop" where emotions dictate actions, often with negative consequences.
Impact on sales results:
- Fight Response: Salespeople become defensive, speak louder/faster, or engage in "product knowledge wars," losing the sale.
- Flight Response: They avoid objections, default to "okey dokey" behavior, or prematurely discount prices without a concession strategy.
- Positive Emotions: Over-enthusiasm can lead to skipping qualifying questions and sales stages, resulting in wasted effort on unqualified prospects.
Breaking the loop. Sales leaders must teach emotion management, starting with increased self-awareness. Encourage daily introspection to identify triggers and understand how personal communication styles might provoke defensive reactions in others. Teach reframing techniques to shift from irrational, fear-based thinking to rational actions, and emphasize tactical breathing to calm the body's stress response during challenging sales conversations.
7. Teach Real-World Empathy to Influence and Connect
The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.
Empathy as attention. Empathy is fundamentally a "paying attention skill," crucial for influencing others. In a distracted, smartphone-driven world, many salespeople struggle to be fully present, hindering their ability to tune into both verbal and nonverbal cues. This lack of attention leads to missed emotional connections and superficial conversations, as customers crave genuine understanding.
Beyond validation. True empathy goes beyond simply validating or paraphrasing what a prospect says. It involves articulating what a person is really thinking or feeling, especially the unspoken concerns. This requires salespeople to be emotionally fluent themselves, understanding their own feelings before they can recognize and respond to others'. When a salesperson can accurately voice a prospect's underlying fears or frustrations, it builds profound trust.
Addressing "sales elephants." Empathetic salespeople proactively bring up potential objections—the "sales elephants in the room"—before they derail a deal. Instead of "overcoming" objections, they acknowledge and explore them, elevating trust and moving beyond superficial discussions. This approach prevents the "meeting after the sales meeting," where decision-makers discuss fears without the salesperson present, often based on false information. By stepping into the prospect's shoes, salespeople can transform conversations and build stronger relationships.
8. Challenge Self-Limiting Beliefs to Unlock Performance
Beliefs drive actions, skills, and outcomes.
Invisible briefcases. Salespeople arrive with two briefcases: one visible, containing their Sales IQ, and one invisible, packed with self-limiting beliefs absorbed from life experiences. These beliefs, whether about themselves, the company, or its products/services, profoundly impact their actions and results. For example, the belief that "I'm too young to call on the C-suite" can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to a lack of confidence that loses the sale, not age itself.
Beliefs about the company. Salespeople often develop limiting beliefs about their company, such as "We're too big," "We're too small," or "We're too new." These perceptions lead to blaming the company for lack of success and can result in missed opportunities, like avoiding larger deals or prematurely discounting prices due to perceived brand weakness. The conviction in one's company and offerings is a powerful differentiator.
Coaching for new truths. Sales managers act as "Chief Belief Officers," helping their teams identify and challenge these limiting beliefs. This involves using "pivot questions" to shift perceptions and help salespeople discover new truths. For instance, if a salesperson believes "Our prices are too high," pivot questions can help them realize they might be targeting the wrong prospects or that other team members are closing at full margin. Storytelling, like Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile, can also inspire new beliefs by demonstrating what's possible.
9. Embrace Failure as a Path to Mastery
You don’t make mistakes. Mistakes make you.
Fear of failure's cost. Many salespeople avoid failure like the plague, leading to significant implications for sales results. This fear causes them to:
- Personalize rejection, leading to self-doubt and limited risk-taking.
- Avoid applying new selling skills, stuck in a "perfection trap."
- Become "people pleasers," sacrificing sales for acceptance.
- Push back on feedback, taking it personally rather than constructively.
- Avoid setting ambitious goals to prevent feeling like a "failure."
Separate "do" from "who." A core principle is teaching salespeople to separate their role performance ("do") from their self-worth ("who"). When they make a selling mistake, they failed in their role as a seller, not as a person. This distinction allows them to learn from failures without internalizing them as personal shortcomings. Sales leaders should explicitly use this language in coaching to create a safe environment for feedback.
Normalize and reframe failure. Sales leaders must foster a "lessons-learned" culture where failure is normalized and even celebrated. Encourage exercises where salespeople identify lessons from past failures and how those lessons positively impacted future sales calls. Reframing failure, like a mentor advising to "get to a hundred noes as fast as you could," transforms rejection into a learning opportunity. By sharing stories of risk and setback, leaders can help their teams understand that struggle is a normal part of becoming exceptional, making them "a hundred times smarter than their competitors."
10. Cultivate Focus and Effective Time Management
Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family, relationships, and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.
The distraction epidemic. In a world saturated with digital distractions, deep focus is a rare and valuable skill. Multitasking is often "multi-averaging," reducing accuracy and quality. This lack of focus hinders learning, diminishes empathy, and wastes significant time. Salespeople with poor focus struggle to conduct effective, hour-long sales meetings, missing crucial information and opportunities.
Time management as priority management. Effective time management is essential for shifting salespeople from "busy but not productive" to high-impact activities. Poor time management leads to operating in the "tyranny of the urgent," constantly reacting to distractions rather than proactively engaging in delayed gratification activities. These include:
- Pre-call planning and research.
- Practicing selling skills.
- Crafting compelling value propositions.
- Nurturing referral partnerships.
Mind mapping and calendar blocking. Teach practical tools like mind mapping to visualize and break down large tasks into manageable steps, then use calendar blocking to commit specific times for these activities. This proactive approach helps salespeople guard their calendars and manage impulses to jump on immediate, but less impactful, opportunities. Encouraging habits like early rising can also leverage peak brain activity for creative, high-value work, leading to increased productivity, reduced stress, and greater job satisfaction.
11. Sales Leaders Must Model Emotional Intelligence
Children observe the actions of their parents, not their words. Children grow up to be salespeople, ones with the same habits of observation.
Mirror, mirror. Sales leaders must ask themselves if they are modeling the emotional intelligence skills they expect from their sales team. A leader with high Sales IQ but low Sales EQ, like Steven who was technically brilliant but drove away talent, ultimately fails. Trust and respect are earned through consistency between words and actions, demonstrating calm under pressure, respectful communication, and genuine empathy.
Breaking the "trigger-response-regret" loop. Sales managers, like their teams, can fall into emotional traps during difficult coaching conversations. When faced with excuses, a leader's "high need to be right" can trigger a defensive, trial-lawyer-like response, escalating conflict and hindering learning. To avoid this, leaders must practice self-awareness, reflecting on their own emotional triggers and the negative stories they might be telling themselves about a salesperson.
Curiosity and empathy in coaching. Shift from judgment to "radically curious" inquiry. Instead of immediately offering solutions or defending company policies, ask questions like "What else could be true?" or "Wonder what's really going on here?" This investigative mindset moves the conversation from emotional reactivity to problem-solving. Furthermore, apply empathy first, before giving advice. Salespeople, like customers, cannot hear solutions until they feel truly heard and understood. This "empathy first, advice second" framework transforms crucial conversations into productive coaching opportunities.
12. "Sales Is Not a Department": Empower the Entire Organization
Your support team and anyone interfacing with customers is a salesperson; they are part of the sales team!
The extended sales team. Sales is not confined to a single department; every employee who interacts with prospects and clients—from the office manager to customer service, warehouse, marketing, and IT—is part of the sales team. These "sale-after-the-sale" interactions are critical, as they determine whether a client becomes an advocate or switches to a competitor. Companies lose billions due to avoidable consumer switching, often stemming from perceived indifference from support staff lacking EI training.
Empathy for the "sale after the sale." Empowering the entire organization means providing emotional intelligence training, especially in real-world empathy, to all customer-facing roles. When a customer is upset, a support person trained in empathy can diffuse anger by articulating the customer's unspoken frustrations and fears, making them feel truly heard. This emotional connection is vital, as customers often take their business elsewhere if they don't feel understood.
Get out of the office. Sales leaders should encourage other department managers to spend time with clients, accompanying salespeople on calls or listening to customer service interactions. This firsthand exposure helps them understand customer needs, challenges, and the impact of their department's work on the client experience. Building relationships across departments and fostering a "sales village" where everyone understands their role in winning and retaining business is crucial for creating exceptional client care and sustainable growth.
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